72
IN HER ELEMENT
“She’s shockingly normal
and down-to-earth,” says
Elisabeth Moss, who stars
alongside McCarthy in
The Kitchen. Balenciaga
coat, Delphine Leymarie
chain and Jennifer
Fisher charm. Hair, Ted
Gibson; makeup, Sabrina
Bedrani; manicure, Lisa
Peña Wong; set design,
Maxim Jezek. For details
see Sources, page 102. For
more on McCarthy, watch
the video at wsj.com.In school, McCarthy was a decent but not outstanding stu-
dent. She was, however, involved: a cheerleader, tennis player and
member of the student council. (She acted in one high school play
but was bored by playing a cheerleader.) Midway through high
school, she grew restless and started going out to bars and clubs
in Chicago. She began to dye her hair raven blue-black (“I believe it
was a Clairol color”) and dress goth. “If Siouxsie Sioux and Robert
Smith from The Cure had a baby, that was me,” she says, laughing.
“In a way, it was my first time doing a character.”
She wanted to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology, but
her parents deemed her too wild for New York, so she enrolled at
Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. “You’d take these sew-
ing classes, and they were like, ‘We’re going to make a potholder,’”
she recalls. Impatient, she dropped out after almost two years and
joined her older sister, Margie, in Boulder, Colorado, where she
worked a series of odd jobs, including telemarketing from a motel
room. Brian Atwood, a childhood friend (who would later become a
well-known shoe designer) from the nearby town of Joliet, Illinois,
came to visit her. “He said, ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you
in New York?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And three days later I moved,” she
explains. “I said, ‘Stop wasting your time,’” Atwood recalls.
Atwood was living in Hell’s Kitchen, on 46th Street, in a tiny
fourth-floor walk-up above the restaurant Orso. “We pretty much
slept in the living room on a futon that we pulled out,” he says.
Atwood understood that McCarthy had a true comedic gift (“She
was literally the funniest person I knew”) and that she had to do
something with it. McCarthy’s first night in New York, they were in
line at a grocery store, and Atwood picked up a copy of the Village
Voice and told her, “You’re doing stand-up tomorrow.” He began
booking her for open mic gigs at various clubs. He remembers one
of her early shows at the Duplex: “She brought the house down. I
had chills because we had just witnessed something special.”
McCarthy continued to perform stand-up in New York for eight
or nine months, but the heckling—and the fact that the only way
to get it to stop was to eviscerate the heckler—began to wear on
her. She enrolled in acting classes and acted in plays “very, very,
very far off-Broadway,” she remembers. Yet they weren’t paying
her bills. She decided that if she wanted to act, she had to make it
work as a business. In the early 1990s, she moved to Los Angeles
and got a job at Starbucks and at the YMCA because they were both
within walking distance of a studio apartment a friend had offered
to share with her in Santa Monica.
Soon after she arrived, McCarthy took a bus to see a Groundlings
improv show on a night that Kathy Griffin, Patrick Bristow, Michael
McDonald and Jennifer Coolidge all performed. A month later, she
auditioned. “Once I got into Groundlings, that was probably the next
10 years of my life,” she says. She met Falcone, her future husband,
frequent co-star, director and co-writer. She developed a cult fol-
lowing. “The moment she walked onto the stage we’d all chuckle in
anticipation. She was so beloved. The lines were always around the
corner,” recalls Octavia Spencer, who went to many of McCarthy’s
early shows and has been friends with her for 20 years. (Spencer will
star with McCarthy in Thunder Force, a superhero buddy comedy
on Netflix directed by Falcone, which will begin shooting this fall.)
McCarthy also met Kristen Wiig, who, along with Judd Apatow and
Paul Feig, would cast her in her career-making role in Bridesmaids.
McCarthy remembers that during that audition, she began
improvising about “dolphin hand play,” as she puts it. “The whole
way home, I was like, ‘Oh, you dummy, you dummy.’” But everyone
loved her interpretation of Megan as a gender-bending man-eater
with the unshakable confidence and bizarre intensity of a coach.
Says Feig: “Little did she know that when she walked out we were
all high-fiving.”
MCCARTHY’S RECENT SERIOUS turn in Can You Ever Forgive Me? has
thrown her comedic roles into high relief, making it clear that she is
a formidable talent, however natural her performances might seem.
“The problem with being in comedy is that everybody discounts
what you do,” says Feig, who has directed McCarthy in four films,
including Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy and Ghostbusters. “They’re
like, ‘Oh, you just show up and be funny.’ They have no idea how hard
it is to pull this off.” Says Falcone: “She can do drama and she can do
physical comedy—there’s such a breadth to what she can do.”
In Can You Ever Forgive Me?, McCarthy plays Lee Israel, a
down-on-her-luck biographer who begins forging and selling let-
ters supposedly written by the likes of Noël Coward and Dorothy
Parker. The film, directed by Marielle Heller, is based on a true
story, and McCarthy doesn’t so much portray Israel as channel her.
She plays Israel as a woman in her mid-50s who, like McCarthy’s
other characters, refuses to comply with what the world demands
of her—she will not peacock around at book parties or write a book
with commercial appeal—but who is as restrained as McCarthy’s
comedic figures are brazen. “I have played so many characters
where I’m just launching things at people as a kind of defense
mechanism,” McCarthy says, “whereas she tried to lie back and
not be seen as much.”
The part has been heralded as McCarthy’s first dramatic role,
but that’s not entirely true. In Theodore Melfi’s quietly humorous
2014 drama, St. Vincent, she gave a warm and subtle performance
as a bewildered single mother who, against her better judgment,
allows her crotchety old neighbor Vincent, played by Bill Murray,
to babysit her young son while she works extra shifts as a radiology
tech. McCarthy’s comedies too have always careened from light to
dark, from hilarity to poignancy, with her characters experienc-
ing moments of heartache and pathos. “If you don’t at some point
break your character and show them at their lowest,” McCarthy
says, “I just don’t think it works.”
McCarthy doesn’t draw a line between comedy and drama.
(“Something’s happened where you’re supposed to pick a side now,”
she says.) She speaks fondly of the sophisticated adult movies of the
’70s, ’80s and ’90s—Tootsie; 9 to 5; Planes, Trains and Automobiles
among them—when, she notes, “comedies were just good movies
that happened to be funny.” She chose to do Can You Ever Forgive
Me?, a film that finds bleak humor in an unlikely friendship, sim-
ply because she loved the character. And she signed onto The
Kitchen—a gritty and imperfect film that, as a female revenge fan-
tasy, certainly presents its share of humor—because she loved the
script. “I want a good story,” she says. “I don’t care what format it
comes in.” Moss elaborates: “The best work really straddles both
drama and comedy, because that’s true to life; that is life.”
McCarthy’s ability to convey life in all its strange and varied
complexity may ultimately be why she transcends not only what-
ever film she’s in, but also the critical establishment’s opinion of
them. (Critics, even when panning her movies, can rarely summon
a negative word about her.) Her performances are compassion-
ate and never mean-spirited. “We’ve all been some version of that
woman,” she says of her challenging anti-heroines. “If you can lov-
ingly shine a light on people’s idiosyncrasies, that’s what makes us
go, ‘We’re all idiots, and it’s all OK.’”
As she talks, you realize that, surface differences aside, there
are deeper resonances between McCarthy and her characters. The
choices she makes are ballsy. She plays women in their 40s and
50s, women who live alone, who have been left by their husbands,
who refuse to conform to societal expectations. She and Falcone
make movies about Middle America, an overlooked swath of the
country, and they perform well at the box office. Their films often
subvert the tyranny of good taste, but there is real joy in watch-
ing female characters who are frequently vulgar, but also free at
a time when few people, particularly women, feel that way. Some
of her comedies may be flawed, but they are so much fun to watch.
She plans to keep making them. “I’d be heartbroken to stop doing
comedies,” McCarthy says. “That sounds terrible.” “IF YOU CAN LOVINGLY SHINE
A LIGHT ON PEOPLE’S
IDIOSYNCRASIES, THAT’S
WHAT MAKES US GO,
‘WE’RE ALL IDIOTS, AND IT’S
ALL OK.’ ”
–MELISSA MCCARTHY